Categories for DailyPost

Aug 12

2025

Absentee landlord hit with historic fine

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The Elmwood Heights Apartments are for sale as former owner faces record fines. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel. The absentee owner of a Buffalo apartment complex may soon be hit with the largest fine ever imposed by Buffalo Housing Court. On July 23, Housing Court Judge Phillip Dabney issued a $1.3 million judgment against Elmwood Heights LLC, the owner of the now-vacant Elmwood Heights Apartments at 597-605 Elmwood Ave., at the corner of Lexington Ave. The three-story, 49-unit apartment complex, which has been in Housing Court since 2018, was condemned in March 2023 by the city for unsafe living conditions, with[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 8

2025

ICE separates parents, 2-year-old child

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Carlos Molina Manzaneda, Rebeca Ferreira Castillo and their child, Ines. Photo provided. On a late July morning, immigration authorities in Western New York targeted the Fredonia Walmart, ultimately detaining a husband and wife. The action separated the parents from Ines, their two-year-old child.  For two weeks now, the toddler has cried nightly, her father said, and has at times refused to eat, not understanding why her parents haven’t come home. A member of the couple’s extended family is caring for the child, who was born in Buffalo in 2023. “It’s like a piece of you is ripped out, like a[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 7

2025

City contractor violates law, is awarded new work anyway

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Over the span of two days in July, the City of Buffalo issued a fine to its primary street paving contractor for violating local law, then awarded the firm three new contracts worth millions. On July 7, according to a letter written by former Department of Public Works Commissioner Nathan Marton, the city issued D&H Paving a $22,214 fine for failing to hire and pay apprentices appropriately on a 2022 paving contract. The following day, July 8, the Common Council voted unanimously on a slate of three paving contracts, all awarded to D&H Paving because the firm was the lowest[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 6

2025

Police overtime in July unabated

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One month into the city’s fiscal year, the City of Buffalo’s efforts to rein in the cost of police overtime have not manifested any savings. In the first two paychecks issued in the month of July, the city paid cops more than $1.9 million in overtime, according to city payroll data. Total pay for police in the pay periods covered by those checks was nearly $8.5 million. In July 2024, police overtime cost a little more than $1.8 million out of $8.2 million total. The July before that, it was $1.6 million out of nearly $8 million total. In other[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 5

2025

U.S. crackdown sends refugees to Canada

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This story is published in partnership with the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB) at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, a collaborative investigative newsroom supported by Postmedia that partners with academics, researchers and journalists while training the next generation of investigative reporters. As fears of refugee deportation mount in the United States, a surge of asylum seekers is turning to Canada — only to find a border that is getting increasingly hard to cross. The number of refugee seekers processed by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) shot up by 87 per cent between January and April. In[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Aug 4

2025

Gaza: The most dangerous place in the world for kids

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A Washington Post story last week focused on children killed during the war. The current body count is 18,500, a number The Post found to be credible and perhaps an undercount.  A Palestinian child has been killed an average of one an hour since the onset of the war, prompting UNICEF to declare Gaza as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.  Wrote The Post: “Some were killed in their beds. Others while playing. Many were buried before they learned to walk.”  Elsewhere, the Guardian reports that Israel has done the math and calculated what it[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Jul 30

2025

Lawmaker asks state AG to investigate Granville incident

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Sheriff John Garcia and Chief of Narcotics D.J. Granville at a March press conference. A city lawmaker wants the state attorney general to investigate the incident in April 2024 in which the Erie County Sheriff’s narcotics chief plowed his county-owned pickup truck into seven parked cars on the city’s West Side. There are currently three inquiries into the incident involving Chief D.J. Granville, which Investigative Post first reported in March. Niagara District Common Council Member David Rivera — a retired city detective  who chairs the Council’s Police Oversight Committee — on Monday appealed to Attorney General Letitia James to launch[...]

Posted 6 months ago

Jul 30

2025

Another bad review for ICE’s Batavia detention center

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For a third time in the past two years, federal inspectors have found that guards at the local ICE detention center in Batavia improperly used force against the immigrants held there. Investigative Post in February reported on two recent federal audits that found incidents where officers were quick to use pepper spray and manhandle detainees instead of deescalating tense situations. Now, a June report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found two additional instances where guards violated the use-of-force policy against detainees. On one occasion, a detainee was locked in his cell, handcuffed. Officers arrived to remove the[...]

Posted 6 months ago
Investigative Post